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What’s Up Doc? Part Three: Shams and Shepherds

Martin Kottmeyer
Magonia 46, June 1993.

Unless Colman von Kevicsky’s characterisation of the 1973 wave as an invasion should be taken seriously, the last significant expression of the invasion fear occurs in Raymond Fowler’s UFOs – Interplanetary Visitors (1974). It is presented as a possibility among a range of intentions that aliens might possess. The idea of friendly contact is raised, but is muted by concerns over loss of national pride as allegiance is transferred to their superior force.

In a chapter archly titled “The Impact – Disintegration or Survival?” the existence of unprovoked hostile acts is pondered as either unwarranted aggression or an amoral act comparable to the swatting of a fly. Fowler believed the American military complex had treated UFOs as a threat, but would be helpless if they proved to be enemies. The blackouts, abductions, attacks, and burns associated with UFOs help to demonstrate that superintelligent aliens are becoming an intimate part of our environment which we will have to resign ourselves to adapting to.[1]

Ralph and Judy Blum’s Beyond Earth (1974) asserts UFOs may be “the biggest story ever”, but they aren”t sure if they are extraterrestrial and paraphysical phenomena or “living holograms projected on the sky by the laser beams of man”s unconscious mind”. The tone is decidedly upbeat, with suggestions that UFOs represent “an almost unimaginable energy source for mankind” and have a habit of unorthodox healing. They quote Hynek”s opinion that ufonauts indulge in “seemingly pointless antics” and also include James Harder”s response to a question about whether UFOs pose a threat:

“If you pick up a mouse in a laboratory situation, it’s very frightening to the mouse. But it doesn’t mean that you mean the mouse any harm.” [2]

Robert Emenegger’s UFOs: Past, Present and Future (1974) also took an upbeat view of UFOs. Contacts were friendly and he concurred with the Air Force that they posed no threat. Understanding UFOs could lead to the discovery of a new energy source and a new relationship to life throughout the universe. Fantastic revelations to questions that have puzzled philosophers throughout history were near and he hoped a reputable organisation like the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the National Academy of Sciences would move forward to study the phenomenon. The immediate future looks promising. [3] Regardless of ones reaction to Emenegger’s opinions the book bears notice for a chapter on how the public would react to The Contact that is the most intelligent in the literature.

In the December 1974 editorial for Flying Saucer Review, Charles Bowen warned that people should endeavour to avoid physical contact because UFOs have been shown to cause harm. There is perhaps a struggle for possession of our planet between good and evil forces, but UFOs may not be greatly concerned with the ultimate welfare of the human race. Noting how much of the phenomenon trades in gibberish, Bowern laments “Hoaxing, we feared, was not the prerogative of earth men”. [4]

Hynek and Vallée’s The Edge of Reality (1975) takes as given “there appears to be no desire for involvement with the human race”. While UFOs are documented as causing harm, it is observed that electrical outlets also cause harm but are not innately hostile. The study of UFOs is regarded as an opportunity to move toward a new reality. New departures in methodology will, however, be needed. The Center for UFO Studies will be set up to serve those ends. [5]

The same general sentiment appears in Vallée’s The Invisible College (1975). UFOs are indifferent to the welfare of the individual and pose no threat to national defence. The primary impact of UFOs appears to be to human belief. Could it be someone is playing a fantastic trick on us? [6]

The Lorenzens answer with a big yes. “SOMEBODY IS PUTTING US ON!” UFO encounters are some sense a charade. They also, however, appear involve coldly scientific experiments on some humans and efforts to stock some distant exotic zoo. There is a threat from UFOs after all, despite government assurances, but not apparently invasion. Fortunately they regard this threat as avoidable. Stay away from lovers’ lanes and isolated camping sites. They argue the time has come to “educate the aliens” with radio broadcasts inviting them to visit openly. [7]

John Keel decides in The Mothman Prophecies (1975) that the battle cry of the Phenomenon is “Make him look like a nut!” It also prompts him to muse after Fort, “If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?” The “worldwide spread of the UFO belief and its accompanying disease” fills him with great consternation. In The Eighth Tower (1975) the dangerous character of the Phenomenon is played up with talk of the high rate of death among contactees and UFO hobbyists, and how “any force that can sear your eyeballs, paralyse your limbs, erase your memory, burn your skin and turn you into a coughing, blubbering wreck can also maim and kill you”. It is dispassionate and ruthless. We are puppets to the superspectrum. [8]

In bizarre contrast Hans Holzer rejects ‘monster’ theories of aliens bent on destroying us. They may regard themselves as potential saviours. Their attempts at cross-breeding suggest we are “not totally unworthy”. [9] Brad Steiger believed UFOs would be a transformative symbol that will unite our entire species into one spiritual organism. They would be the spiritual midwife which brings about mankind”s starbirth into the universe. [10] Paris Flammonde takes the view that man will never achieve intercommunication or a symbiotic relationship with extraterrestrials in UFO Exist (1976) [11]

The Hynek UFO Report (1977) reflects the emerging consensus. UFO study could perhaps “be the springboard to a revolution in man”s view of himself and his place in the universe”. But they also appear to be “playing games with us”. [12] D. Scott Rogo similarly felt UFOs demonstrate that our world plays host to a force that seeks to mystify us. [13] Bill Barry's account of the Travis Walton controversy evaluates the phenomenon as having never expressed hostility towards any of its alleged victims. Abductees are treated merely as guinea pigs. [14]

As in his book in the fifties, Leonard Stringfield’s Situation Red: The UFO Siege (1978) is a portrait in confusion. Commenting on aircraft accidents, disappearances, and persistent spying, he admits to being stumped by the pointless harassment. UFO activity resembles a military strike force, but the randomness and absence of widespread destruction falls short of open hostility. If they wanted to destroy our civilisation, clearly they could. Their effects are sometimes deleterious and sometimes beneficial. The paradox may be sinister or profound, but it is still unresolved. [15]

Art Gatti’s UFO Encounters of the 4th Kind (1978) involves sexual incursions and arguably falls into hypochondria. The sexual manipulation he chronicles proves at minimum the beings involved are questionably motivated. Maybe they are curious. Maybe they are milking our emotions like cattle. Maybe they include two forces; one benevolent, the other wicked. Maybe they are seeding Earth with warriors for a future Armageddon. [16]

Brad Steiger’s Alien Meetings (1978) represents a curious regression into the hypochondriacal mindset. Chapter 9 warns “UFO Encounters May Be Hazardous to Your Health!” and catalogues the usual troubles. Motives for aliens include invasion, domination, territorial acquisition, and commercial exploitation, but he dismisses the war of the worlds idea as “paranoid mutterings”. It would surely have been easier to mash us when we were hurling rocks around instead of nuclear weapons. Whether they are on a spiritual mission or pursuing history lessons, they at least seem to be intensely interested in us. [17]

D. Scott Rogo and Jerome Clark’s Earth’s Secret Inhabitants (1979) sees the Phenomenon as a source both of good things like raised IQs and healings plus bad things like burns and radiation effects. It provides us with visions of things humans want to believe. “In fact, up to a certain point it may be good for us to believe in these things – providing, of course, that we don”t become so superstitious in the process that we lose our grip on common sense”. Maybe they are clues to some larger truth. [18] Vallee in Messengers of Deception (1979) essentially shows that losing one”s grip on common sense is the usual result of UFO belief. As such it could be a useful political tool and agent of social control. On the brighter side, UFO study might clarify exciting theoretical and practical opportunities to understand energy and information.[19]

In 1979 Yurko Bondarchuk saw imminent, before the year 2000, contact with extraterrestrials. “It is inconceivable that their journeys to a peripheral planet are merely haphazard or mindless.” They are surveying our self-destructive capabilities and our resource base. He expects the contact to lead to the emergence of a ‘new world order’ in which existing territorial and ideological conflicts will be gradually eliminated and eventual creation of a restructured world economic order. A universal re-evaluation of spiritual convictions could also be expected. [20] Raymond Fowler similarly speculates that UFOs represent a “much-needed bridge between science and religion”. The events of The Andreasson Affair (1979) strike him as a stage-managed religious experience by interstellar missionaries. Betty Andreasson and others like her have been primed subconsciously with information which might burst into consciousness all over the planet. [21]

D. Scott Rogo in UFO Abductions (1980) confesses the whole UFO abduction syndrome appears to be “slightly ridiculous”. There is too much misinformation which appears designed to make the abductees appear to be “total fools”. His guess is that these experiences are an elaborate facade, a camouflage forcing the individual to confront a secret aspect of himself. [22] Rogo’s book includes an article by Ann Druffel, written a couple of years earlier titled ‘Harrison Bailey and the Flying Saucer Disease’ and which involved the medical misadventures of a man who said he was told his internal organs were three times older than they should have been. Druffel diagnoses his problems as resulting from microwave radiation in a UFO encounter. [23] Druffel doesn’t know if Bailey was harmed accidentally or deliberately, but Bailey thinks it was unintentional. In The Tujunga Canyon Contacts (1980) she opts for a view of UFOs as looking after man”s continuing evolution. They take special interest in our procreative abilities or they are interested in expanding our consciousness. [24]

The Proceedings of the First International UFO Congress (1980) presents a portrait of seventies ufology identical to what we’ve chronicled so far. Leo Sprinkle thinks contact messages are seemingly reliable because of their similarities to each other and thus offer information on the scientific and spiritual development of humankind. [25] Berthold Schwarz thinks the messages are garbage. [26] Frank Salisbury remarks that UFOs seem too irrational and perverse – they verge on the truly diabolical. [27] Stanton Friedman expresses his disagreement with Jim Lorenzen”s characterisation of the phenomenon as an insult to human intelligence. [28]

In their study of several abduction cases, Judith and Alan Gansberg reported there wasn’t one where the extraterrestrials were cruel to humans. Indeed, one abductee felt the aliens are angels. They conclude, in contrast to Vallee, the concept of extraterrestrials is doing man no harm and could potentially be helpful. [29]

Raymond Fowler continues ruminating about the Andreasson affair in Casebook of a UFO Investigator (1981) but in a somewhat larger context. He thinks that superintelligent beings have possibly been nurturing man along his evolutionary way. We are under intense attention, perhaps as potential candidates for the intergalactic community. They love mankind. [30] The Andreasson Affair – Phase Two (1981) basically reaffirms the religionist slant of phase one and includes the millennial expectation that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ will happen during the adult lives of Bob and Betty Luca. [31] UFO by Milt Machlin with Tim Beckley is an interesting minor work with a hypochondriacal flourish or two. An odd case of a UFO murder is recounted in which people were killed either because they knew too much or they were being experimented upon. It closes with a UFO health warning that is charming in its simple tone: Do not approach UFOs. People get shocks or even end up in the hospital. You could also get hit by a ray gun. [32]

The appearance of Budd Hopkins’s Missing Time (1981) represents a significant, albeit ambivalent, return to the hypochondriacal mindset. Hopkins regards abduction cases as an epidemic, but because people are protected by an induced amnesia it may be almost entirely invisible. He writes: “I do not believe the UFO phenomenon is malign or evilly intentioned. I fear, instead, that it is merely indifferent, though I fervently hope to be proven wrong.”

He adds: “For all any of us know the whole UFO phenomenon may be ultimately blissfully benign – there is firm evidence for this position – and so having been abducted may turn out to have been a peculiar privilege.” Even so, he is “thoroughly alarmed” and calls for an official UFO investigatory arm to be established through the United Nations so everyone would recognise UFOs as a serious reality to the governments of the world. [33] The contradiction between his alarm and the consensus of the prior decade he has trouble abandoning is unresolved.

Of Brad Steiger’s The Star People (1981) and The Seed (1983) we will only comment that it is basically contactee literature for the eighties crowd. (34) John Magors Aliens Above, Always (1983) also has the paternalistic quality of contacteeism – they are watching us for our benefit [35] Cynthia Hind offers the speculation in passing that aliens are here to be entertained or to blow our minds a little in African Encounters (1982). [36]

Lawrence Fawcett and Barry Greenwood in Clear Intent (1984) border on the hypochondriacal in saying the human race could be in danger, but the laconic counterpoint that we haven”t yet been conquered seems to be a call for ennui rather than concern. [37]

George Andrews in Extraterrestrials Among Us (1986) offers up my all-time favourite hypochondriacal speculation: “It is an odd fact that among the viruses there are some that look like UFOs, such as the virus T. Bacteriophage. Some UFOs may have the ability to operate in either the macro-dimension of outer space or the microdimension of viruses, switching back and forth between them at will.” [38] Andrews frets that our survival as a species may be at stake. “Have we been transforming our planet into a cancer cell in the body of the galaxy instead of making it the garden of the universe?” he asks. [39]

Terry Hansen, in a 1981 article, offered a more appropriate somatic metaphor for the upbeat ufology of this period. He suggested UFOs may be a sort of “liver medicine” to make us function normally as part of a cosmic organism. [40] Night Siege (1987) drifts along the borders of hypochondria in its chronicling of power blackouts, surges, interferences, and pain associated with a UFO flap. [41]

Intruders (1987) shares the same quality of unresolved contradiction as the prior Hopkins book. Aliens are committing a species of rape in their activities related to an unthinkable systematic breeding experiment to enrich their stock, reduce our differences and acquire the ability to feel human emotions. What they do is “cruel” and each case is “a personal tragedy”. Yet he also avers: “In none of the cases I’ve investigated have I ever encountered the suggestion of deliberate harm or malevolence.” They don’t realise the disasters they are causing because of an ignorance of human psychology. [42]

Richard Hall titled his 1988 book Uninvited Guests. It is one of the more flaccid titles in the literature and more connotative of pushy salesmen than an alien menace. Hall finds little evidence of overt hostility and suggests harm is accidental or self-defensive. Encounters probably represent mutual learning experiences. There is a strong interest in us and he hopes this means we are beginning a new phase and maturity, and perhaps a new relationship to the universe. [43]

When Tujunga Canyon Contacts was reprinted in 1988 Ann Druffel modified her views in the light of new developments on the abduction scene. Aliens were now malevolent and traumatising, wily and harmful. The good news was that humans have the ability to battle them off – prayer, move your toes, or make your own sound. [44]

Vallée’s Confrontations (1990) tallies up twelve cases of fatal injuries attributable to UFOs and announces the phenomenon is more dangerous and technologically complex than we thought. He feels “a renewed sense of urgency” about UFO study. [45]

Raymond Fowler’s third book on the Andreasson affair, The Watchers (1990), seems to represent a falling back to the hypochondriacal state we saw him in at the beginning of this period. He feels “like a medical researcher who has inoculated himself in order to experience and treat a disease under study. To his horror, he finds the UFO phenomenon linked to the extinction of mankind by sterility. It is inconceivable, but he also believes it to be authentic. [46]

POST MORTEM

Credit first where it is due. The Air Force got it right and told it straight. No material threat to national security existed. The invasion never took place. Mirarchi’s Pearl Harbor, Riordan’s knockout attack, Keyhoe’s final operation, Wilkins’s death ceiling blockade, Michel’s Sword of Damocles, Lorenzen’s mass drugging, Edwards’s imminent “Overt Contact”, Fawcett’s disaster beyond all imagination, Steiger’s annihilation threat, Hynek’s Russian breakthrough, Palmer’s ongoing titanic war, and Fowler’s cultural disintegration were concerns with more basis in fantasy than in reality.

The sense of urgency, the sense that it may be too late, the sense that our existence was dependent upon a correctly performed investigation was irrational fear. The Air Force repeatedly tried to get across the message that ufologists were wrong but they were in no mood to listen. It is dogma among ufologists that the Air Force was incompetent or worse, yet if that is accepted as a proper, measured evaluation, what word is proper to describe the body of thought presented by these ufologists? The Air Force did not perform flawlessly in the details, but they had the big picture in more than sufficient focus to understand it was a nuisance problem and not one of life and death significance.

The same cannot be said of ufologists. The big picture for them keeps changing. In the fifties the aliens were considerate and peace loving. In the sixties they were a source of danger and death. In the seventies they were both perversely irrational and a source of hope and maturity. The eighties saw them as a source of trauma. Are these interpretations progressively getting closer to the truth? Are they changes in fashion? We can dismiss the notion this is scientific progress. The sixties were worse than the fifties. The eighties are clearly headed into a blind alley with the ideas of alien genetic sampling and implants. Fashion connotes enthusiasm, but ufologists profess dread over the implications their studies are leading them towards.

The changes are reminiscent of changes known to happen in paranoia over time. I confess a degree of puzzlement why ufologists first regarded aliens as potential benefactors. Science fiction stories generally portrayed them as malevolent back in the thirties and forties. Possibly there were science popularisers pushing the notion, but I can’t prove it. Irregardless, the interpretive drift toward malevolence is consonant with the darkening world. view as paranoids withdraw from social contact and turn inward. The stage called hypochondria is entered as the ego collapses and the fear of death asserts itself in a variety of forms such as world destruction fantasies and imaginary persecutions. These persecution fantasies have led some workers to term this the `pursuit” stage of paranoia. The sixties of course did have such themes. The Men-in-Black fantasies flourished in this period. [47] Stories of UFO chases and UFOs shadowing people were also a commonplace occurrence. They, however, are a subset of a wider range of fears and less central to the core manifestations of approaching death.

Robert Jay Lifton, who has offered an exploratory investigation of death symbolism based on study of the aftermath of Hiroshima, has made some suggestive comments on the relationship of a genre of outer space invaders films in Japan to radical impairment of life-death balance and helplessness spawned by the threat of nuclear annihilation. [48] This impairment also led to Godzilla and fellow monsters tramping all over Tokyo. Such films are of course mirrored in America’s alien invasion genre and the giant insect fear films of the fifties. The apparent absence of similar genres springing up elsewhere may point to the crucial cultural significance of responsibility over Hiroshima as the nexus of fifties’ paranoia.

That the invasion fears of ufology may be rooted in this emotional nexus is a hard idea to get away from. Donald Keyhoe’s book M-Day and articles like ‘Hitler’s slave spies America’, ‘Spies are laughing’, and ‘Rehearsal for death’, bespeak a paranoia preceding Hiroshima for him. One could also argue Mantell’s crash had more to do with stirring up an emotional resonance to a crash Keyhoe experienced which led to his leaving the Air Force than to nuclear fears. It could contrarily be argued, though, that such articles express a gung-ho identification with the war effort and the nation which would intensify guilt over Hiroshima which inaugurated a new cycle of collapse. All very possible, but clearly hazardous given the scanty details of Keyhoe”s biography. [49]

One can occasionally view the personal dimension of UFO fears with less ambiguity. One of the more fascinating exercises of the hypochondriacal style is Alvin Moore’s Mystery of the Skymen. Though published in 1979 it was conceived in 1953 under the title The Spaceisland Menace and retains the flavour of that early period in ufology. The book tallies at splendid length an immense number of strange injuries, vehicle crashes, murders, and puzzling disasters which he lays to the activities of the skymen. A whole section is devoted to a variety of mysterious diseases around the country and world which he ties to fogs of sky-chemicaLs laid down by the flying saucers. The most amazing part is the pages he devotes to the ill effects he personally experienced from flying saucer gas. Moore concluded that a massive invasion, though possible, was not happening because of our great numbers and their failure to reduce us to a manageable amount. They also had no defence against A-bombs. The situation, he admits, had lightened since the fifties. [50]

Wilhelm Reich similarly believed in an alien menace and saw physical evidence everywhere of a ‘DOR emergency’. Aliens were withdrawing life energy from our planet. It could be seen in the decay of vegetation, the crumbling of rocks, a feverish atmosphere, and the activities of neurotic, ‘dorized’ individuals at the FDA who were against his orgone cures. Reich suffered ill effects directly from the aliens. One instance of nausea it wasn’t flying saucer gas causing the trouble, but Deadly Orgone Energy (DOR), that was sapping the life out of him. [51]

Labels of the UFO problem as a malady and a virus are delightfully apt expressions of the hypochondriacal style. If it is wondered if this is reading too much into what could be termed a mere literary device, the examples of the style provided by believers in the Jewish world conspiracy should allay any doubts. Their writings often referred to their enemies as bacilli, syphilis, the plague, and viruses. They entertained poisoning fantasies such as the belief that mass inoculation programmes were plots to inject Gentiles with syphilis. The concomitant appearance of world destruction fantasies can be seen, for example, in Mein Kampf where Hitler warned that if the Jew gained power “his crown will be the dance of death for mankind, and as once before, millions of years ago, this planet will again sail empty of all human life through the ether. [52]

Hypochondria is not a permanent condition. The ego attempts to reintegrate itself eventually through the building of psychological defences against the masochistic attacks of the conscience. Ideas of reference form to disown the contents of the mind and retrospective falsifications form to rewrite one’s personal history and form a new identity. Conspiracy logic organises the chaotic social reality around the subject with delusions of grandeur arising to overcompensate for the prior self image that caused shame.

The case of Howard Hughes provides a well-known example. Hughes was a psychogenic cripple with intense germ phobias. Elaborate Kleenex rituals were just a part of his weird behaviour. He feared poisoning, demanded daily reports on radioactivity in the air, and ordered surveillance on girls he knew. The roots of this psychotic episode are probably twofold; the first a 1946 air crash which friends believe he never emotionally recovered from and the second a breakdown when he lost control of TWA, his prized toy in his collection of companies. Toward the end of his life he emerged from the illness sounding “calm and sober” and no longer whining. He stated a mission to join the fight to outlaw all nuclear testing. [53]

Ufology hasn’t quite reached the stage of having a sense of mission yet, but there are numerous indications that it has moved out of the hypochondria stage and into later stages of projection and conspiracy logic. As we pass from the sixties to the seventies the word ‘urgent’ seems to drop out of the literature. Calls for investigation decrease and the mass drugging idea is heard from no more. As the ego reintegrates, the view of outer reality gets more upbeat and aliens are seen as less monstrous and more caring. The bizarre properties of alien nightmares, dreams and fantasies become more evident and efforts are made to discount them on some level. The sense that aliens are behaving irrationally is a hopeful sign of increased reality-testing, but is foremost a defensive strategy to deny inner torment. The recognition of trauma in eighties ufology is a double-edged revelation. The removal of denial opens up ufology to regression or resolution. Time will tell, but the flowering of conspiracy theories in recent years augurs well that reintegration is still proceeding.

It is human nature that people don’t often go around proclaiming their mistakes and I won’t feign surprise in observing I failed to find any ufologist reflecting on the remarkable misjudgements, the spectacle of error that took place in sixties ufology. It would have been nice to be able to point to someone even who expressed relief that the invasion had been called off. It is an open question whether ufology learns from its past mistakes or not given such silence, and perhaps it is one best left unasked for the implications include the likelihood that ufology is systemically an irrational enterprise conforming to stereotyped forms of psychological eccentricity. There have been crueller ways putting that.